Floral bouquets arranged with nonperishable gift items or keepsakes have become popular gift items. For example, flowers are often arranged and sold together with candles and their holders, statuettes, glass and ceramic jars, memorabilia and a host of other reusable items. Such arrangements typically include a container having floral foam into which the flowers of the bouquet are inserted, and a supporting structure, for securing the keepsake to the floral arrangement.
When designing these types of arrangements, numerous features are desirable. First, when fully assembled, the arrangements should serve as attractive displays for the retail shops where they are sold as well as in the print and video media in which they are advertised. Accordingly, the flowers and keepsake should be prominently displayed, while the structures supporting them should be small, unobtrusive and, to the extent possible, hidden from view.
Second, the arrangements should be very simple to assemble. This feature translates to a reduction in both assembly and assembly training time, factors of particular importance in high volume and highly cost sensitive retail operations. Further, since assembly is often conducted by minimally skilled florists' assistants, minimizing the number and complexity of assembly steps and potential for mistakes is obviously desirable.
Third, the components of such a system should be universally applicable to the numerous types of keepsake arrangements that are available from a manufacturer. Designing such components minimizes the total number of different components needed to support a particular line of products, resulting in several cost-saving benefits to the manufacturer, including reduced design time, part number tracking, manufacturing runs, and inventory costs, to name a few. This, in turn, reduces the costs to the retailers and, ultimately, the consumers.
Fourth, such bouquet/keepsake assemblies can take up a relatively large volume of space, which, of course, impacts shipping costs to the retail flower shops, especially for those shops that purchase in high volume. Thus, minimizing the shipping volume would be highly desirable.
Finally, floral arrangements en route to their final destinations are often subject to less than ideal delivery conditions, such as improper loading into delivery vehicles and careless driving. This fact leads to the potential for inadvertent disassembly of these arrangements due to their tipping over or bumping into neighboring arrangements or other objects. Therefore, the assembled product must be sufficiently secured together to remain in tact during transportation to its final destination.
Currently, several designs combine floral bouquets with keepsakes. U.S. Pat. No. 4,521,990, to Murray, is one example. This invention addressed the problems of arranging and securing a lid of a decorative container that supports a floral bouquet. In particular, a removable retainer, or pick, secures the lid at one end, and is inserted into the body of stalk supporting material at the other end in the same way as the flower stalks are inserted. This solution has proved to be very successful for its intended purpose. However, this invention is limited to solving the particular problems attendant supporting with a two-piece keepsake, such as a container and lid, in a floral display. However, it does not address the problems attendant with other types of keepsakes, in particular singular, large and heavy gift items such as large candles or ceramic figures, because such retainers and florist foam could not support such large items.
U.S. Pat. No. 903,227, to Pruden, also discloses an arrangement for supporting a keepsake above a floral display residing in a container. This invention provides a solution for supporting a particular type of keepsake, namely a candle, above a floral bouquet. However, the keepsake is designed to remain in the supporting structure, which is actually a candelabrum, after the floral bouquet has lived out its useful life. Thus, the entire supporting structure is actually part of the keepsake. Further, this invention does not address the needs described above, and in particular, the goal of having a single versatile system for securely and economically supporting a myriad of keepsake arrangements.
Other designs suffer from one or more of the aforementioned shortcomings. Some are relatively difficult and/or time-consuming to assemble, others are not sufficiently sturdy when assembled to ensure that they will remain intact upon delivery, still other assemblies are too costly for high volume sales and marketing, and some take up large amounts of space when shipping from the manufacturer. In sum, none of the existing designs offer a single, cost effective product that meets all of the above-discussed criteria. Meeting these criteria is made even more challenging when the keepsake to be supported is a relatively heavy gift item, such as a large candle or solid statuette.
Accordingly, there has existed a definite need for a simple, secure, versatile and, economical floral bouquet/keepsake system that is aesthetically pleasing to the customer and gift recipient. The present invention satisfies this need and provides further related advantages.